Where jailbreaking iPhones is most common

A significant number of iPhone owners have chosen to circumvent Apple’s default iPhone OS installation with a hacked version that lets them install applications from outside the App Store, have applications running in the background, and so on. It’s called, as you probably know, “jailbreaking”.

There are a lot of jailbroken iPhones out there. Exactly how many is hard to tell, but there are estimates that as many as 8.5% of all iPhones and iPod Touches are jailbroken. That number comes from Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, a kind of alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones.

So where in the world is it most common to jailbreak your iPhone?

Countries where iPhone jailbreaking is most common

If you study where searches for “jailbreak iPhone” are most common, you should get an indication of what regions of the world are most inclined to this practice. So once again, Google Insights for Search comes to the rescue. We looked at search statistics for the last 12 months and got the following results.

Top 10 countries/regions:

Singapore

Hong Kong

France

Switzerland

Australia

Austria

Sweden

United States

Netherlands

United Arab Emirates

Some of the countries hovering just outside the top 10 list are: Norway, Iceland, Germany, Canada and Malaysia.

So there you have it. Based on Google’s search statistics, here is the situation when it comes to jailbreaking iPhones:

Singapore is the most jailbreak-happy country in the world.

The English-speaking country where jailbreaking is the most common is Australia.

Interestingly, the United States, Apple’s home market, is in the top 10. These are normalized numbers, so the US doesn’t get this position simply because it’s a big country with lots of iPhone users.

France is the European country where jailbreaking iPhones is the most common.

To conclude, a breakdown by larger regions

If we aggregate the top 10 countries into larger regions, we get the following distribution:

Europe: 5 (France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands)

Asia: 2 (the top two regions; Singapore and Hong Kong)

North America: 1 (USA)

Middle East: 1 (United Arab Emirates)

Australia/Oceania: 1 (Australia)

Half of the top 10 are European countries. This could be a side effect of the fact that Europe houses a large portion of the world’s developed countries, countries that are likely to have a good amount of iPhone users (and smartphone users in general).

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4 comments

Very interesting post, as an avid apple products customer I’ve always wondered what would happen to my phone or service if I ‘jailbroke’ my iphone; like say for example if my phone would crash if i tried to do current apple updates. It’s interesting to see the map laid out like that, I would expect US to have the most jailbroken phones considering the market size. Kuddos.